Hiking the Nootka Trail

Peter B. had proposed a backpacking trip between the time Jan left B.C. for California and before our trip to the Yukon. He invited his hiking buddy Paul C. to join us on the West Coast Trail from Tofino to Bamfield, but there were no reservations available for that heavily traveled route, so he suggested we do the Nootka Trail, a less known but comparably grand and remote wilderness experience. I agreed, as usual, to follow his lead, and he and Paul together did the research and made the necessary preparations, including getting plane and boat reservations, trailguides and maps. After it took me almost a full day just to shop for my own provisions and pack for a six-day expedition, I felt grateful for all their legwork.

August 27 South of Third Beach

The sun drops into a rising fog bank above distinctive trapezoidal rocks and a tree-topped headland. The waves’ roar has been unabated since I first heard it deep in the forest on the trail from Louis Lagoon. White tips are painted on the crests of broken rollers. The thunder of water colliding with stone vibrates in my gut. Thick foam left by turbulence and mashed red-tide algae accumulates on the beach. This is wilderness West Coast. Nothing but the tiny settlement of Friendly Cove until Tofino, 75 miles to the south and only small towns fifty miles back up the inlets where the mills used to churn. But before contact with Europeans in the late 18th century, this seacoast was home to hundreds of thousands of people for five thousand years.

We were conveyed here by ferry across the Georgia Strait from Powell River, by Subaru to Gold River, by Nootka Air Seaplane to the Lagoon and by our feet across an isthmus of old growth cedar, hemlock and spruce on a rough trail cut and maintained by volunteers. It winds through tangles of roots and windfalls obscuring the borders between ground and growth, living and dying. Immense trees, leaning and erect, sprout from fallen nurslings and grizzled snags to reach for sky. Underfoot, ferns and bunchberry capture spots of sunlight that penetrate the dark canopy.

I walked at a slug’s pace to balance the weight of the pack and spare my knees, and also to gaze at a living world hardly disturbed by humans. It feeds, aspires, grows, strengthens, procreates, cooperates and competes, weakens and dies as we do, at a different temporal scale and speed.

We found this campsite not indicated in the guidebook. It provides water to try out Peter’s fancy ozone generating purifier kit, which no one likes. After an aperitif of whiskey from the plastic bottle, we were excited to share our first dinner: sautéed garlic and onion, tiny pasta rings, tomato sauce, fresh pesto I bought from Pat Hanson, and a little bit of sliced cervelatwurst, a guilty pleasure on my cholesterol-free diet.

Yesterday’s blasting surf settled to a smooth rush from far offshore across the tidal shelf. The quiet creek winds through first-growth spruce forest, clear enough for me to explore in my water shoes after the regular post-hike nap. Many of the spruces are snapped off with a horizontal break at 50, 100 or 200 feet and surrounded by light coming through the hole their fallen tops leave in the canopy.

Contrasting to the noise and motion of sea and sky, the creek walk prompted reflection on the unpeopled landscape we’ve been immersed in now for more than 24 hours: the margin of land and ocean varying from forest and rock outcrop to beaches of sand, boulders, pebbles and vast sandstone shelves.

I wore parka, rainpants and poncho to stay dry through the swamps, fog and drizzle that succeeded the sunshine of our first day. My pants kept slipping down and my glasses kept fogging up from the heat of exertion, especially during the half hour we found ourselves bush-crashing to recover the lost trail. The weight I’d added to my pack to reduce Peter’s tortured my shoulders until Paul showed me the proper strap adjustment to bring it closer to my back.

The series of headlands requiring diversions through the bush ended and the beach turned into a flat tidal shelf of sandstone with good traction extending for a mile seaward and disappearing into the fog.

Drifting off to nap after the day’s six-hour trek, I counted primal contraries revived by backpacking: wet-dry, hot-cool, cold-warm, hungry-full, thirsty-slaked, tired-rested, anxious-relieved. Now my boots, soaked in the last creek crossing, have dried and warmed by the fire.

This morning dawned foggy. Paul had coffee already brewed on his stove as I crawled out of the tent, less stiff and achy than on previous days. Walking on the hard grey sand along the smooth curve of Skuna Bay was fast and fluent. We were greeted by a flock of killdeer at a little creek’s descent into the ocean. A distinct track preceded us, which Paul identified as wolf. For a while it was joined by bear prints and the delicate tracks of killdeer and sanderlings which follow the water’s moving edge, a double oscillation of waves within tides.

As we rounded the point at the south end of Skuna Bay under an awning of horizontal spruces, the sky disrobed, revealing its naked blue splendor and the sun’s brilliance. The top end of the bay where we’d camped remained in clear view, but continued shrinking into the expanding landscape. Three days now with no trace of other humans—no logged stumps or springboard notches, no boats or planes or even contrails—except for a sprinkling of detritus on the beach: mostly water bottles and net floats.

Calvin Falls came into view, a white cascade of fresh water pouring into a deep pool with a slow circular current that empties into an ocean-seeking stream flowing across the wide beach. I welcomed the chance to get out of my wet boots and take a cleansing swim before lunch. As we continued on, the friendly packed sand was replaced by large polished boulders, at first difficult to negotiate but soon allowing light-footed progress guided by close attention to the steps immediately ahead, enhanced by the stones’ artful variety of texture and color. Then the boulders got covered with thick deposits of seaweed and eelgrass ripped by storms from kelp beds offshore. We either had to slog through the soft wet piles or balance our way along the driftwood stacked at high tide line. At first the stench was overwhelming but after an hour or so, one got used to it.

We found a fresh water rivulet and nearby a tent site on a soft bed of rotten eelgrass behind a thin barrier of logs that separated us from mountains of broken bull kelp, giant kelp and other algae that would provide a fortune in sushi, fertilizer and xanthan gum to anyone who could harvest it. After a nap Peter and I headed up into the bush to reconnoiter, drawn by sky visible above the treetops. We tunneled through salal up to a bench where it thins to allow relatively easy walking among widely-spaced first-growth trees and windfalls. We made for a huge gnarled cedar and found around its back traces of removal of cedar planks by native inhabitants long ago. Such “Culturally Altered Trees” provide evidence in present-day land-claims negotiation. We wandered further back along the trunk of a windfall hung up in the crossing of a cedar and a spruce and ended up fifty feet above the forest floor in the middle of the clearing it created. Peter’s foot dropped through a hole in the moss, but he didn’t fall. We bushwhacked toward the little creek leading to our campsite on the beach and crossed on a windfall leading to another old-growth cedar with a bear’s lair in its hollow base. When we returned to camp, we found Paul napping instead of cooking. After a rude awakening he cooked up a much-anticipated meal of jambalaya and sockeye salmon with chocolate pudding for dessert. The incoming tide nudged piles of seaweed into gracefully curved windrows along the shore.

I got up to pee at 1:00 A.M. and was shocked by a bright orange moon sinking behind the shelf it exposed by pulling out the tide.

As we loaded our backpacks in the morning, Peter called out “the Wolf !” I looked up, and there it was, fifteen feet away on the other side of the log. My camera, which I usually carry on my belt, wasn’t working because of a battery malfunction, and I yelled, “get the cameras.” As Peter and Paul scrambled for theirs, the creature stopped and I got my first look at a wolf in the wild. Rather than the fierce and proud appearance I expected, it seemed hangdog and scrawny, but nevertheless surprisingly large. Its ribs protruded and its face, as it turned toward us, was flat and small-eyed, its legs long, its tail down. As they snapped pictures, the wolf ambled over to a pile of bull kelp, nosed it disconsolately, stared up at us with an expression of hopeless hunger and moved on. It recalled the wolf in illustrations of Little Red Riding Hood.

We hiked around the next point and passed a couple of cabins on the bluff above Beano Creek, which our both our trailguide and the pilot had mentioned were not to be disturbed and which were at the end of a logging road that could, before long, allow the trucks into this still unprotected section of the coast to destroy the forests we marveled at. We followed some flagging we thought indicated the trail around the impassable headland ahead up into the bush and ended up behind one of the cabins. An elderly gentleman yelled across a logged-over patch that we were on the wrong trail and that we should take the bypass further down the beach. Paul thanked him and then found a ripe red tomato unaccountably left in the middle of the trail. We welcomed it as compensation for our first unsavory reencounter with civilization. An added infusion of fresh produce materialized along one of the arduous bypass trails–a large colony of chanterelles, which Paul and Peter pounced on with expressions of glee.

For several hours, the trail alternated between steep headland traverses through old-growth cedar groves and beautiful pocket beaches, including a sighting of a contented looking Pacific otter, the species rendered almost extinct by the fur trade between Indians and Englishmen during the 19th century. We felt ready to stop at a small cove protected by limestone and marble walls and tall spruce-covered headlands. I climbed a tiny treed promontory that rose from the middle of the beach and Peter and I explored a sea cave at the north end. While Paul set up camp and gathered firewood, Peter took a swim in the rocky surf. I got wet and then lay down and buried myself in warm smooth beach pebbles. Then I cooked dinner of couscous and tuna while Paul sautéed the chanterelles with a garnish of tomato. Sunset and fire rounded off the evening.